Los Santos has a new way to get you in trouble, and you don’t even have to commit a crime.
A new Grand Theft Auto V mod from artist Morry Kolman, who goes by WTTDOTM online, installs 235 virtual Flock license plate reader cameras around the game’s fictional city. Called Grand Theft Automated License Plate Reader, or GTALPR, it brings an extra layer of surveillance to your next drive. And because this is GTA, you can destroy the cameras and collect in-game cash from their wreckage.
But the opportunity to blow them up is only part of the point. Kolman wants players to feel what happens when a familiar environment becomes a place where they’re constantly being watched.
“I’m an artist, and much of my practice is based around giving people interesting and engaging ways to learn about the technological and political world around them,” Kolman told Mashable. “GTALPR is very much in that vein.” For Kolman, a game modeled on an American city, and familiar to millions of players, offered a way to make surveillance tangible.
“Suddenly, you’re always watched,” he added. “With the simple addition of some cameras, the entire environment gains a new passive layer of hostility.”
Bringing Flock’s camera network to Los Santos
In the real world, Flock’s automated license plate readers capture vehicle images and enable police to search for vehicles and receive alerts about those on watchlists. Flock pitches the technology as a way to help law enforcement locate wanted vehicles. Civil liberties groups, including the ACLU, argue that these networks enable mass surveillance of people going about their everyday lives.
Kolman’s virtual version draws directly from the geography of the real network. “I chose 235 for the number of cameras to use in GTALPR because it is 1/10th the amount of Flock cameras currently in LA County, and Los Santos is about 1/10th its real counterparts size,” he told Mashable.
Mashable Light Speed
His project page identifies the community mapping project DeFlock as the source for the camera count. The placements aren’t random, either. Kolman built himself a tool to compare the real and fictional maps, then used it to place cameras in corresponding locations. “The closest comparison is probably the area around Santa Monica Pier vs. Del Perro Pier,” he said.
Credit: Morry Kolman
The result brings a real-world surveillance footprint into a place players may already know street by street.
One of the mod’s most pointed feature kicks in when players haven’t committed a crime. Each time a player passes through a camera’s field of view, there’s a 1-in-20 chance it will trigger an unprovoked police chase to “represent this pattern of false reports, and show that living with this surveillance is not a matter of ‘having nothing to hide’… it is simply a matter of ‘when will it happen to you,'” Kolman described.
Why bring the surveillance state to GTA?
His broader argument is that avoiding wrongdoing doesn’t eliminate the risks of being surveilled. He described the mechanic as a challenge to the familiar reassurance that people with “nothing to hide” have nothing to worry about.
Players can also dismantle the virtual network. Destroy a camera and collect its remains, and the mod awards $600 in game currency. The reward price is based on the estimated value of the parts inside a real Flock camera, after the group Eyes Off Cedar Rapids took one apart to examine its hardware.
There’s also built-in speedrun tracking for destroying the cameras, plus an option to render and save the images they capture — including pictures of players destroying them.
It’s an absurd addition to a game already full of opportunities for mayhem, but a fitting one in a country where Flock cameras have made everyday drives part of a searchable surveillance network.
As Kolman puts it, “I put Flock cameras in GTA V as a way to highlight and make tangible the pervasive intrusion of Flock and other ALPR cameras into daily American life via a game that is based on an American city and that millions of my fellow citizens are intimately familiar with.”
The mod and its installation instructions are available through Kolman’s website.
